


light a candle, light a motive

by strange_estrangement



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blood and Gore, Gen, Horror, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-06-26 12:40:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19768399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strange_estrangement/pseuds/strange_estrangement
Summary: A demon walks out of a graveyard. A demon and a psychic walk into a bar. A demon, a psychic, and a witch walk toward a homicide.





	light a candle, light a motive

i. graveyard

The life everlasting rarely ever lasted, and so she’d prepared. Mausoleum. Embalming, thorough. Sealed casket. Plastic-lined concrete vault. Cemeteries willing to inter you in a mausoleum weren’t hard to find if you didn’t care where you were laid to rest, if you had no personal attachment to any particular place in this country with its wide open spaces, smoggy cities, great earthy hills—and of course if you were willing to pay. And so, she’d paid for the best of the best, and it had seemed worth it at the time.

As they say, in the end it doesn’t even matter.

Bodies are bodies, and bodies decompose, the curse of the mortal coil. She’d learned in Hell. The mechanics of it. The smell of it. The feeling underneath her fingertips and worming under her skin. She’d watched it in action, twisted round and round and upside down in a kaleidoscope reality, and felt it on herself. Mosquito buzzing into your ear but in reverse because in the end your brain fizzles out. Tear tracks on your face but gray and viscous instead. Thanksgiving dinner but in reverse because in the end your stomach backtracks to your mouth. Snapcracklepop of maggots under your skin, squirming Rice Krispies.

It doesn’t even matter.

It doesn’t matter because God has a sense of humor, and the mechanics of putrefaction aren’t worth a damn when God decides all bodies, souls newly ensconced, should look like zombies, uniform in their decay, dead one year or ten or a hundred. Boring, Bela thought. A million ways for a body to go wrong, or to follow its God-given destiny—she’d seen them all, she’d done most of them—and in the end they all look the same.

They all look the same, no great improvement from Hell after all. For the first few (hundred) years, she was on the rack, and then she was off it; variety is the spice of life, and she hadn’t exhausted that variety. They pull you off too soon. You’re not blackened enough until you take your first slice, and then you blacken too quickly. Still, it’s a long process, made longer by Hell’s transition to paper pushers and pencil skirts, gloriously (briefly) interrupted by the bloody chaos of a (failed) revolution. And if Bela now bled black smoke through her gaping cheek—hissing through missing skin, slithering through criss-cross muscle—she’d retained enough of herself to care about the girl she’d served in Hell’s long line. 

Magda Peterson. 

Bela had finally seen the name on the last form she’d submitted, which Bela had—per Regulation 39274, Subsection ZZ, Clause 32—denied with a large rubber stamp. D E N I E D in big block letters like something out of a cartoon.

Abaddon had the right idea, Bela had thought, wielding her imbecilic stamp like a gavel. D E N I E D, and Bela had looked up at the girl—Magda—and handed her the next set of forms, gesturing to the end of the line two miles back. Magda had dropped her eyes, turned, and started her shuffle back. That one would be ready soon, Bela had thought, ready to graduate from tortured to torturer, although it was all the same in this toothless incarnation of Hell.

Magda Peterson. Born: Mason City, Iowa. Died: Pleasant Valley, Missouri in a bus stop restroom. Humiliating. Cause of Death: Gunshot Wound via Arthur Ketch. Backstory: Tragic, and Bela’s stomach had twisted even after all this time, for she recognized the other side of her own coin when she saw it. Abilities: Psychic, a boon which Bela realized as she staggered out of a mausoleum and watched mindless zombies lurch zigzag without a purpose.

For Bela was fine, save for her missing cheek and the smoke leaking through, the slough of her right forearm, the way the flesh on three fingers on the left melted down and away from the bones. Save for hair, lank; left eye, cloudy; right toes, missing. Jaw sewn shut, and that they don’t teach you in school. She reached through her ruined cheek, muscle and tendon worm-slime and elastic, and dug until she found the edge of the string. Pulling, pulling, the slide of it through her jaw and nose like the sting of an earring through a piercing not yet healed, like the burn of floss against broken gums.

Save for all that, she was fine, better off than the souls yanked from Heaven, pulled sideways from Purgatory, scooped from Hell’s queue. And Magda would be too, she figured, if Magda didn’t lose her head in the chaos.

Destination: Pleasant Valley. A thousand miles away, maybe less, but what’s a thousand miles for the undead? Nothing. 

She snapped four necks in the city, lifted four wallets, hesitated outside a Lexus. Two doors. Impractical. She brushed her fingers over the paint, dug in with the bone of her left pointer. Bone on paint, nails on a chalkboard, and she smiled with her cheek pulling strangely. Farther down the street, a man stopped his Jeep at a red light, foolish, for what did traffic signals matter during a zombie apocalypse? Foolish, for a four-door hardtop Sahara with glossy, perfect paint says the only outdoor activity you enjoy is glamping, and you won’t put up much of a fight. 

So: five necks snapped, and she pulled herself into the driver’s seat.

  
  


ii. bar

Magda had lost her head in the chaos.

Or perhaps, more accurately, Magda had lost her body; zombies aren’t discerning consumers. The grave nearby, someone’s (not-so) final resting place, had welcomed Magda’s head, and so Bela lowered herself into that grave to retrieve it. Brushing the dirt off Magda’s (intact) cheek— jealousy twinging—Bela held it by the bit of spine still attached, her hand wrapping perfect around the C3 and C4. A popsicle, or a candied apple. The grate of bone on bone as Bela’s fingers scored against the spinal column woke Magda, and Bela watched as her eyes flitted wildly behind her closed lids. 

Bela pinched one eyelid between working fingers, pulled down and out, away from the barbed eyecap holding it in place. Drop of plastic against the grass. Magda’s eye rolled in the socket, bloodshot. Bela could count the veins, stark red against yellow leeching into the sclera. Repeat. She screwed a single finger up through Magda’s neck, gelatin, searching through soft tissue, digging herself a cavern. There, a bit of string, and she pulled. 

If Magda felt any of it, she didn’t show it.

“Do you remember who I am?” and Magda whispered, “Yes.” Still meek, then, after all this time. Bela didn’t care for the reverence she saw in Magda’s eyes, as if she were still staring up at a cross in a filthy basement. Something to be discouraged. Neither meekness nor reverence suited them.

Said Bela: “I have a plan.” Said Magda: nothing, and Bela sighed. “Come on then. Let’s see a witch about a body.” 

A pair they made, Bela thought, the black of her circulating with the air conditioning in the Glamping Jeep and Magda oozing in the passenger seat. She never seemed to stop oozing, really, as the black cloth of the seat went blacker still, blood-heavy and stinking. Too much of it, too much thick, hot blood, more than one girl’s head could possibly contain. A pair they made, rolling up to a dumpy watering hole in a dumpy town, a half demon and a tenth of a psychic in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. A pair they made, Bela stepping out of the Glamping Jeep with one severed head tucked under her arm, blood pattering on the concrete in time with the rain plinking on the tin roof. A trail of breadcrumbs, but thickviscousblack instead, not to last.

The parking lot was, of course, deserted. The dead rose in Kansas, just as they had in Pennsylvania, just as they had in Missouri, and the citizens of the Midwest—doubtless better prepared than city dwellers hundreds of miles away—still chose to opt out of happy hour. Through the front door Bela stepped, head in hand, welcomed by a chipper “Wonderful to see you again, my dear.”

“What do we have here?” asked Rowena, gesturing, glass in hand, at Magda. 

A different side of the same coin, thought Bela. Out loud she said, “A friend. An acquaintance, really.”

“I see. And what do you wish me to do about it?”

“You know what I want.” Behind the counter now, Bela found a pitcher, ill washed, the rim beersticky, and set it on the bar. She placed Magda’s head on the pitcher, the leak of it dripping down and pooling. 

Rowena eyed Magda, from eyes to tip of spine, and then studied Bela’s ruined cheek. “Aye, I suppose I do.”

Blood. It required blood. Magda said, “Use mine,” and Bela and Rowena looked to her in surprise. Not so meek after all, perhaps. The pitcher was filling steadily, Bloody Mary, missing only a stick of celery. Bela’s lips felt dry.

“Kind of you, darling, but we need more. Much more,” and Rowena looked to Bela.

Skin split like paper, the edges of it peeling back and away from the muscle underneath. Bela picked a the edge even as the blood flowed into bowls ready to swallow this grisly offering. She imagined, then, pulling and pulling until the skin came away in a great sheet, white and billowing, holes eaten through like wool to the moths. Right forearm already sloughing. Just needed a nudge, a tug. 

She clenched her fists.

Sigils drawn around the room now, Rowena’s red right hand tacky with it, grasped around a blade. Latin then.  _ Anima corpori. Fuerit corpus totem resurgent _ , and she sliced quick across her arm, her blood dripping down to anoint Magda.

Burst of white light, and for a moment Bela feared it might blast her skin off after all, but then it was over. Magda, whole, sat on the bar counter.

“Your turn, my dear.” Latin again, slice of the wrist, and a new body.

iii. homicide

Bela and Magda spoke in unison: Arthur Ketch.

“Ah, I see.” Rowena’s eyes slowly drifted from Bela to Magda before she smiled, no teeth. “I suppose there’s no harm in tagging along, is there?”

Just a skip over, that was it, and if this town was a blip among the grass and the dust, Lebanon barely registered. Bela was glad of the Glamping Jeep, after all, bouncing over poor man’s pavement and kicking up dust in the rearview.

The end of the world, Rowena explained, drew all manner of vermin back to—and here she hesitated—back to this town, and Bela wondered why; received only that Rowena kept dreadful company these days, no fun really, anyway, turn right here, go until you see signs of life. Bela rolled her eyes, and corners of Magda’s mouth twitched. 

A one-stoplight town, without the stoplight. Utility poles marched down roads, looming, casting twentieth century holiness over the undead and newly alive, and Bela watched as Magda followed each one until it left her line of sight before looking at the next. Single gas station, torched—recently, for it still belched smoke into the air. No one around to witness. Ramshackle farmhouses, some stripped of the farm and some not, sat next to tiny ranches with crumbling porches and peeling paint; Bela wondered if dilapidation was more holy or less. Magda’s expression said, more.

They drove north out of town, stopping only at a deserted monument and a tiny chapel. “U.S. Center Chapel,” the sign read, and Magda did not look away as she climbed out of the car. “He’ll come here?” she asked.

“Aye.”

Expression darkening in time with the sky and with the approaching miasma of ill intent, Magda watched the cloud of dust kicked up by a single black motorcycle. Confidant of him to assume he could handle a witch alone, and foolish, for Rowena was not alone. Kickstand hit the ground, and he paused at the lineup in front of him. He dismounted anyway, foolish again, gaze slinking from Bela (unrecognized, discounted) to Rowena (recognized, wary) to Magda. Stuttered then, and Magda smiled.

“Kneel,” she said, and he did, face red with the force of fighting and losing in his own mind.

“Wait—” and he could say nothing after that. He stayed on his knees, and he looked up at her, the fury in his eyes nothing to hers. 

“One moment, my dear. He has a charm—”

“Yes,” Magda said. She paused, searching. “Below his heart.” She nodded to Bela, who walked forward. Split of shirt, and then skin and fat and muscle; he’d buried the charm deep. The skin beneath her knife was thicker than her own undead skin had been—the edges of it didn’t threaten to curl back like paper or shred into delicate streamers. She dug in with her fingers, familiar, and the knife in her other hand, blood tacky around the handle, felt familiar too. Warm.

Bela pulled out the charm, and Rowena set it alight in the dirt around the chapel. The reflection danced in her eyes, brief before it fizzled out, and Bela wondered at her satisfaction.

No time, for Magda was waiting. Bela walked around him, devil on his shoulder, devil at his back. 

Magda now, eyes glassy with memory. “In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.” She paused, looking at Ketch. “You know where you sent me, and where I’m sending you.”

Nodding to Bela, she raised her arms wide, staring up at roiling black clouds.

The soft patter of blood on dust—Hell’s rain. Each drop sent up a tiny puff of dust until enough of it flowed out of the corpse to pool against the side of the chapel, staining the siding red, seeping into the foundation. A bloody offering for a bloody God. 

Magda closed her eyes, listening, and then looked to where he lay in the dust and in his own blood, eyes still open and mouth twisted in shout that never came. She wasn’t smiling now, but neither were her eyes dark with fear or anger or grief. She looked to Bela, who in turn looked to Rowena. 

“Do you know a place we can stay?” Bela wiped her hands against his coat, but the grooves of her knuckles were still stained. “I’d love a bath.”

Rowena smiled. “Aye, we’re very close.”

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" by R.E.M., and the Bible verse is John 14:2-3.
> 
> Fun enrichment activities: listen to “Zombie” by The Pretty Reckless, “Eat Raw Meat = Blood Drool” by Editors, and “Fresh Blood” by Eels; read "Stiff" by Mary Roach; google “how much does a human head weigh” and “smith center ks”


End file.
